FORM generators

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alex.barylski
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FORM generators

Post by alex.barylski »

Which ones exist?

The only one I know of is HTML_QuickForm...

I'm looking into using one on my current project, see what happens... :P

Anyways, I'd like to hear the pros and cons of any you know of, even that mentioned above...???

Cheers :)
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

I love the one you mentioned. Works great. You can completely customize the output (comes with support for a number of template systems, as well as the ability to write your own renderer plugin)... write plugins for extra rules/filtering. It's great. Form validation is so easy now that I use it.
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

Fill me in who made it? Where can you find it? Is it oop or proceedural etc....
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Maybe have a look at Manuel Lamos' class Forms generation and validation at phpclasses. Haven't used it myself but have been keeping an eye on it. Looks very complete and is in very active development. Is at ranking no 1 on phpclasses so it's certainly not the worst class there.

Another one which I do have experience with is http://www.formhandler.net/. Works very well and is quite complete too. It's a class which let you generate forms easily and do stuff with the results (show error messages, email data or sent th data to db, etc). However, as it is a standalone complete class, I'm not sure how easy it will be if you have special needs or want to integrate it (functionally) in an existing framework of code. You'll have to take a look at the code for that.

Sorry I can't give you more details, but maybe these 2 are interesting enough to have a look at.
alex.barylski
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Post by alex.barylski »

That Manuel guy has quite a bit of code on phpclasses...seems to be a well respected guy...

Although I think I'm gonna take a stab at CSS forms, see how it goes...in which case I need to likely hand code them :)

I'll look into that second class for sure, never heard of that one :)

Cheers :)
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Yes I guess that's a drawback of many existing solutions: it's hard to control the exact output. In other words, you'll get a bunch of tables, no css, no clean markup etc. (if you find one, please let me/us know)
alex.barylski
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Post by alex.barylski »

I can't be bothered to even look, as I'm not a huge fan of FORM generators, but I've suggested to Oren he considered looking into writting a CSS generator...

So hopefully he has something in the works :)
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

like I said... HTML_QuickForm lets you customize the output. I haven't done it yet, because so far it's been very easy to just style the generated forms (but I haven't used it for any real complicated forms yet). It allows you to write your own renderer and has built-in support for smarty and a couple other template engines. I was considering writing my own until I found this one. Very easy and fast.

Also, for those of you who aren't aware, this is a Pear package.
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